It gets to be a long day when you get up at six-thirty am, hike for a few hours in thirty-plus degrees and then do a few bus trips, but the distances in South America are so vast that if you want to see and do as much as you can, this is neccessary.

Since we left the Park in Paraguay, we took a four-hour bus ride to Concepción where we had a distinctly ordinary dinner and took another bus ride of a few hours to an out-of-the-way place called Pozo Colorado. Waking up from a snooze at midnight , our neighbours kindly tell us we´re at our stop and we head off the bus in a daze. At this stage a guy yells at us to run to another bus and runs off with my backpack. I race after him just in case he isn´t from our booked bus, but he is and we roar off from the remote truck-stop style town. Ed and I are very pleased with our luxurous leather reclining seats and due to our exhaustion from the hike earlier we doze off again.

Another rude awakening at 3 am and we´re told this is border control for Paraguay. If we thought the last town was in the middle of nowhere, we were wrong. This town is in the middle of nowhere! The surreal nature of the evening continued as we stepped off the bus to be greeted by a wildly enthusiastic three-legged dog. The amputation had left a long bit of skin/fur dangling down which caught the strong breeze, so this black-and-white bouncing thing wasn´t the prettiest of creatures.

The immigration building looked like a garden shed. The serious-looking guard outside was dressed immaculately in uniform with the exception of a pair of thongs. He ushered every person inside the shed individually and secretively.

Entering the shed with passport in hand, I was greeted with the sight of one official sitting on an unmade bed, and the other (clearly just out of the other bed) sitting at a desk complete with various papers and the Paraguayan flag. The formalities were slow but painless and I had my exit stamp. Time to snooze again...